The present invention relates to error correction in coding schemes for digital communication systems, and more particularly to design optimization for Interleavers of any size within a specified wide range used in such error correction. Even more particularly, the present invention relates to optimization of Turbo Interleavers such that smaller optimal Interleavers can be built from larger optimal Interleavers.
Interleaving is a process of reordering a sequence of symbols or bits in a predetermined manner. "Interleaver size" is equal to the size of the sequence. The apparatus performing the interleaving is referred to herein as an Interleaver.
Turbo Interleavers are interleavers used in the construction of turbo codes. In a turbo code built as a parallel concatenation of two constituent recursive convolutional codes, a Turbo Interleaver serves to re-order an input data sequence in a pseudo-random fashion prior to an encoding by a second of the constituent codes. As a result, separate encodings produced by the two constituent encoders are largely uncorrelated, which property allows them to be combined by a turbo encoder to produce a composite encoding with excellent error protection capability.
S-random Interleavers are one of the most widespread forms of turbo Interleavers.
The principle behind S-random Interleavers is to avoid mapping neighbor positions of an original input sequence to another neighbor position of the interleaved sequence within a window of size S. The design goal in S-random Interleavers is to maximize S while preserving the above principle. However, S-random Interleavers have to be re-designed every time the Interleaver size is changed and there is typically no requirement of any resemblance between the Interleavers with similar sizes.
Thus, it is desirable to have a general Interleaver design for Interleavers of any size within a set of sizes, wherein the design methodology is concise and efficient such that the same Interleaver design is near-optimal for all Interleavers within the set of sizes. It is also advantageous to have a design for building a near-optimal Interleaver that can easily be reduced to smaller-sized near-optimal Interleavers without performance degradation.
Therefore, the present invention advantageously addresses the above and other needs.